Devastation

“ The storm, that spreads ruin and devastation in its path, is no less a proof of a wise and overruling Providence than the gentler phenomena of nature, which, with such constant and unvarying regularity, refresh and bless the earth. ”

“ And there are men and women who appear and vanish like shooting stars or falling meteors. Their path is traced in ruin and devastation, as the path of the tornado, as the path of the locust is. And having accomplished their appointed work, they pass on like the destroying wind, like the winged devourer: leaving prone trees and ruined homes, wrecked ships, stripped fields—Death where there was Life. ”

“ You resemble a fury of hell, blind, devastating, and bloody. Amid the horrors of civil war, amid lakes of blood and mountains of dead bodies. you always present yourself like a spectre, inciting all to devastation, slaughter, and revenge ”

“ In a war so protracted, and carried on with such various success, these scenes of devastation had occurred so often, that the country appeared almost depopulated, or the few stragglers, who yet lingered round the places most eagerly contended for, had been habituated to suffer till they had almost lost the semblance of humanity. ”

“ But when we come to the slaughter of whole towns, the devastation of country effected purposely that men and women might starve, to the abandonment of the old, the young, and the tender, that they might perish on the hillsides, to the mutilation of crowds of men, to the burning of cities told us in a passing word, to the drowning of many thousands,—mentioned as we should mention the destruction of a brood of rats,—the comedy is all over, and the heart becomes sick. ”

“ All the great and beneficent operations of Nature are produced by slow and often imperceptible degrees. The work of destruction and devastation only is violent and rapid. ”

“ It is impossible to recount the terrible devastations which historians and travellers relate that they have committed at different times, in various parts of the world. Many are so venomous, that persons handling them are immediately stung, and seized with shivering and trembling ”

“ When verdure and life have deserted the scene;
Thou art like a tall column, unmoulder'd by time,
That rises 'midst ruins, imperial, sublime,
So firm is thy rock-pillar'd throne!
Yet the storm is around thee, the hurricane roars;
But valor and loyalty dwell on thy shores,
And long may the guardians remain!
Firm, ardent, intrepid, oh! long may they stand,
The sabre of justice and truth in their hand:
Then the fire-flag of rapine may blaze thro' the air,
The torch of invasion, a comet, may glare,
And the war-tempest threaten—in vain! ”

“ Why should I speak of tempests, various and uncertain, wherein the attack upon all things is tossed about without any order or discrimination?—in shipwrecks, that the fates of good and bad men are jumbled together, their deserts confounded?—in conflagrations, that the destruction of innocent and guilty is united?—and when with the plague-taint of the sky a region is stained, that all perish without distinction?—and when the heat of war is raging, that it is the better men who generally fall? ”

“ Charged deep with death, upon the waves, far seen,
Move the war-freighted ships; and fierce and red,
Flash their destructive fires—The mangled dead
And dying victims then pollute the flood.
Ah, thus man spoils Heaven's glorious works with blood! ”

“ Thou hast gained, and wield'st a power, to which The rulers of the elements do bow; The hurricane, at thy command goes forth, Walking where'er thou bid'st it, and the storm Ceases to howl when thou hast said,—"Be still!" Thine anger stirs the ocean, and thy wrath Finds out the deep foundations of the mountains, And shakes them with its strength; the subtle fire, That lights the tempest on its gloomy way, Starts from its cloud-rocked slumber, at thy call, To be thy messenger. Canst thou not be content when thou art feared By those who rule a world? ”

“ I think of the great disaster; of the hours of terror and despair known by millions of people. I think of the thousands and thousands of men, women and children trapped in subways and theaters, trampled to death, butchered, murdered. I visualize the hospitals full of the sick and the dying, the giant liners of the air and of the ocean crashing, colliding, going down into the sea; and I seem to hear the screams and the pitiful prayers for help of the maddened passengers. Tell me, what fate should befall the fiend who would loose such woe and misery on an unsuspecting world? ”

“ You will recall more clearly than I certain horrible, catastrophic, universal-ruin passages in Revelation—monsters swallowing the universe, blood and fire and clouds and an eternal crash, rolling ruin enveloping all things—well, all that's come. There are, perhaps, ten million men dead of this war and, perhaps, one hundred million persons to whom death would be a blessing. ”

“ Fire and wild light of hope and doubt and fear,
Wind of swift change, and clouds and hours that veer
As the storm shifts of the tempestuous year;
Cry wellaway, but well befall the right.
Hope sits yet hiding her war-wearied eyes,
Doubt sets her forehead earthward and denies,
But fear brought hand to hand with danger dies,
Dies and is burnt up in the fire of fight. ”

“ We should be awake while we are here, and try to release them from their bondage, for ere long the terrible storm will break loose; every man's hand will be let loose upon his neighbour, and blood and distress, turmoil, sorrow, misery, war, and destruction will sweep the whole face of the earth as with the besom of destruction. ”

“ The fight is now for life—sweet life, for helpless babe and homeless wife— The culmination of the strife spectacularly grand. On sweeps the hurricane of fire. The fatal touch is given. The detonation of the blast goes shrieking up to heaven. The mansions of bonanza kings are tottering to their doom; That swirling tide of fiery fate halts at the gaping tomb. Beyond the cataclysm's brink, the multitude, too dazed to think, Behold the red waves rise and—sink into the smoldering gloom. ”

“ Its fall may startle the world with its shock; the fragments may strew the earth in a wreck as gigantic as were its proportions when it drew the gaze of admiring or trembling nations: but they are but the more striking proofs of the destruction that has overtaken it;—it is a ruin still. ”

“ Wide o'er the fields a waste of ruin laid,—
'O Heaven!' he cried, 'my bleeding country save!—
Is there no hand on high to shield the brave?
Yet, though destruction sweep those lovely plains,
Rise, fellow-men! our country yet remains! ”

“ Earth with thy folds, and hollows and holes, into which a man may fling himself and crouch down! In the spasm of terror, under the hailing of annihilation, in the bellowing death of the explosions, O Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting surge of new-won life. Our being, almost utterly carried away by the fury of the storm, streams back through our hands from thee, and we, thy redeemed ones, bury ourselves in thee, and through the long minutes in a mute agony of hope bite into thee with our lips! ”

“ All through the long hours the work of destruction went on, and the screams of affrighted animals, the agonised cries of dying people, the crash of falling houses, the roar of the flames, and the howling of the fierce wind, made up an appalling spectacle such as the world has rarely witnessed. ”

“ Nothing can describe the appalling crash of the storm wind, rain and thunder in one moment, the roar of the furious sea, the swaying of the ground, the shrieks of the people, who thought death here at every instant. ”

“ What if all Her stores were opened, and this firmament Of Hell should spout her cataracts of fire, Impendent horrors, threatening hideous fall One day upon our heads; while we perhaps, Designing or exhorting glorious war, Caught in a fiery tempest, shall be hurled, Each on his rock transfixed, the sport and prey Or racking whirlwinds, or for ever sunk Under yon boiling ocean, wrapt in chains, There to converse with everlasting groans, Unrespited, unpitied, unreprieved, Ages of hopeless end? ”

“ Nothing is left me now, not even the consciousness that I have helped to win the Cause for which I battled. All have fallen into the abyss. The deluge has drowned us all. Everything dear to me which I wished to preserve has been destroyed with my own ruin. ”

“ Enough! this tragedy need not be heightened by an infant weltering in the blood of him that gave it birth. Nature, reluctant, shrinks already from the view; and the chilled blood rolls slowly backward to its fountain. We wildly stare about, and with amazement, ask, who spread this ruin round us? Has haughty France or cruel Spain, sent forth her myrmidons? Has the grim savage rushed again from the distant wilderness? ”

“ But as soon as the cruel tempest of war cometh on us, good Lord, how great a flood of mischiefs occupieth, overfloweth, and drowneth all together. The fair herds of beasts are driven away, the goodly corn is trodden down and destroyed, the good husbandmen are slain, the villages are burned up, the most wealthy cities, that have flourished so many winters, with that one storm are overthrown, destroyed, and brought to naught: so much readier and prompter men are to do hurt than good. ”

“ And such the storm of battle on this day, And such the frenzy, whose convulsion blinds To all save carnage, that, beneath the fray, An earthquake reeled unheededly away! None felt stern Nature rocking at his feet, And yawning forth a grave for those who lay Upon their bucklers for a winding-sheet; Such is the absorbing hate when warring nations meet. ”

“ The storm of conflict raged from dawn to late in the afternoon, with unabating fury. Men on both sides seemed immune to fatigue or fear, and for fourteen hours, as if endued with supernatural energy and power, struggled amidst dust, smoke, starvation and wounds and death with unflagging fury, in the maddening work of ruin and destruction. ”

“ And life died quite when died the living Word.
So lies this ruined city. She hath heard
The rush of foes brutal and strong and proud,
And felt their bolted fury. She is ploughed
With fire and steel, and all her grace is blurred. ”

“ Waiting in meekness till the storm be pass'd,
Assured an hour of peace will come at last;
That there will be for thee a calm bright day,
When the dark clouds are gathered away.
How canst thou ever sorrow's emblem be? ”

“ In the words of one whose descriptions, however fraught with the most wonderful power of painting, are equally marked by truth, “Every horror that could make war hideous attended this dreadful march. Distress, conflagration, death in all modes,—from wounds, from fatigue, from water, from the flames, from starvation,—vengeance, unlimited vengeance, was on every side.” ”

“ Never in history has so great a calamity descended so suddenly upon the Human Family, unless we except the earthquake toppling down cities and submerging a whole coast in a single night. But how small all that has ensued from any such convulsion, compared with the desolation and destruction already produced by this war! ”

“ The night with every passing moment seemed yawning wider and wider before him in a chasm that threatened ruin, and disaster, and the wreckage of everything that in life was worth the living, and—no,’ Not yet! ”

“ O thou enemy, destructions are come to a perpetual end; and thou hast destroyed cities; their memorial is perished with them.—Psalm ix. 6.
Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.—Matthew, vii. 13.
’Tis safer far to be that which we destroy,
Than by destruction swell in doubtful joy.
Shakspere.
What a scene of misery
Hath thine obdurate frowardness, old man,
Drawn on thy country’s bosom! and, for that,
Thy proud ambition could not mount so high
As to be styled thy country’s only patron ”

“ To the whine of the shells that tears one's nerves
And the crash that's only not near enough;
Back we go to struggle with mud,
To stumble and slip on the greasy boards,
Back we go to the stink of the dead,
Back we go to the sleepless days
And the unwashed weeks and the mouldy months,
Back we go to the thirst and the dust,
Back we go to the grim despair
That holds a man by the heart in France. ”

“ It is like seeking the dead and wounded on the battlefield, or the missing, the maimed or the dead after an earthquake, or some devouring tempest or flood—so much alike, at least in their results, are the eruptions of the elements and the fierce, uncontrolled passions of man. ”

“ Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
Barbarous kings.
A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom,
Three hundred and sixty thousand,
And sorrow, sorrow like rain.
Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning,
Desolate, desolate fields,
And no children of warfare upon them,
No longer the men for offence and defence. ”

“ With the pale shadow of doom upon them,
How shall they foil the dread foe?
Often, when life and its cares seem darkest,
Doth aid and guidance appear,
And the storm and the threatened danger
On the horizon disappear. ”

“ That storm will some day burst upon you, you cursed off-scourings, and it will disperse you to the ends of the earth, you scabs on the body of the people—the people from whom you, yourselves are descended. ”

“ The shivered surge; when rising griefs deform
Thy peaceful breast, hie to yon steep, and think,—
When thou dost mark the melancholy tide
Beneath thee, and the storm careering wide,—
Tossed on the surge of life how many sink! [Pg 24]
And if thy cheek with one kind tear be wet,
And if thy heart be smitten, when the cry
Of danger and of death is heard more nigh,
Oh, learn thy private sorrows to forget;
Intent, when hardest beats the storm, to save
One who, like thee, has suffered from the wave. ”

“ The dead of the ten thousand slain upon the battle-field return no more—the thrice ten thousand hearts that mourn, bleed on, but form no part of the estimate of war’s disaster. The thousands of brothers, young, impetuous, adventurous, are gone! ”